Description of the New Netherlands was written in 1653 by Adriaen van der Donck, just two years before his death. After living for years in a Dutch Settlement near what today is Albany, New York, van der Donck wrote the description of the land, peoples, vegetation, animals, and beauty of his new home. Included in his description are observations on animals such as the beaver, and on the customs and languages of the Native Americans in the area, particularly the Mohawk and Mahican tribes. Van der Donck's authority on Native Americans was unprecedented at the time, and his descriptions of their lifestyle is one of the most detailed accounts of Indian laws and customs from the 17th century. Adriaen van der Donck (1618-1655) was born in Breda in the Netherlands, but became a settler in "the New World" in 1641. He graduated as a law student from the University of Leiden, and was the first lawyer to settle in New Netherlands. While there, he became a landowner and adept scholar in the ways of the local Native Americans, befriending them, eating with them, and learning their languages. He helped to negotiate deals between colonies and the natives, but a disagreement with governor Peter Stuyvesant in 1949 concerning settler's rights sent him back to the Netherlands with a petition to encourage economic freedom. Van der Donck returned to the colony before his death in 1655, where his nickname "Jonkheer" inspired the name for Yonkers, New York.

This edition of A Description of New Netherland provides the first complete and accurate English-language translation of an essential first-hand account of the lives and world of Dutch colonists and northeastern Native communities in the seventeenth century. Adriaen van der Donck, a graduate of Leiden University in the 1640s, became the law enforcement officer for the Dutch patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, located along the upper Hudson River. His position enabled him to interact extensively with Dutch colonists and the local Algonquians and Iroquoians. An astute observer, detailed recorder, and accessible writer, Van der Donck was ideally situated to write about his experiences and the natural and cultural worlds around him. Van der Donck s Beschryvinge van Nieuw-Nederlant was first published in 1655 and then expanded in 1656. An inaccurate and abbreviated English translation appeared in 1841 and was reprinted in 1968. This new volume features an accurate, polished translation by Diederik Willem Goedhuys and includes all the material from the original 1655 and 1656 editions. The result is an indispensable first-hand account with enduring value to historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists.

The book is a comprehensive study of British travel in the United Provinces during the Stuart Period and largely based on journals and correspondence never before published. After a discussion of travel journals and correspondence as a literary genre with conventions of its own, the book focuses on the more concrete activities of the tourist: transport, accommodation and sightseeing. A large number of guidebooks provided the necessary information and helped the tourist to write his observations on Holland and the Dutch. Letters by Edward Browne (1644-1708), passages from the journal of John Locke (1632-1704) and the financial accounts of the third Earl of Orrery (1670-1703) take the reader through most of the provinces and give a first-hand impression of what travel was like for various categories of tourists in those days. This book is indispensable for all scholars of Anglo-Dutch relations in this period who are interested in learning about day to day experiences of Britons visiting Holland.

The sets of landscape etchings produced in the second decade of the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde drew on and contributed to a print culture that played a key role in defining "Dutch" landscape. Examination of these printed landscape series as part of a wide-ranging print culture underscores the consistent interrelationship of landscape, history, and politics. To varying degrees, the contemporaneous descriptive geographies, histories, allegorical tableaux, didactic prints, and poetic anthologies considered in this study provide parallels for the prints' serial structure, journey theme, and commemorative motifs. Moreover, as part of a wider enterprise of Dutch self-definition, they provide cultural guidelines for the interpretation of landscape in prints and paintings. Levesque's study of the Dutch seventeenth-century experience of place is two-tiered. She addresses the journey through landscape as an interpretive framework, the spatial structure of knowledge, the benefits of travel from the point of view of humanists, and the growth of a Dutch national self-consciousness expressed through landscape. She also provides a close reading of the structure and motifs in the print series of Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech, and Jan van de Velde.